Iris (aka The Dink)
Iris was born April 26th, 2021. Her mother died when she was still very young, and she became a bottle baby. She was very sick as a baby and came close to dying but with a lot of patient nursing and late nights, she made a full recovery. She came to live on our farm when she was 4 months old as part of a kid exchange. Akyla farms babies needed to be weaned and our boys needed to, as well, and it was much quieter to just swap kids until they got over missing their moms.
Iris wasn’t ready to give up the bottle yet, at only four months, but she came with all her friends, and I continued giving her bottles. Iris was very tiny for her age, as her rough start in life stunted her growth but she made up for her diminutive size by having a huge personality! She bossed all her goat buddies around despite being half their size. The big goats didn’t faze her at all. She was short enough to run under the hot wire surrounding the milking parlor and would break in while I milked Sabrina and Alliekat and help herself to the chaff hay and alfalfa pellets, sunflower seeds, and flax-seeds that the milking does were getting. She would yell at me from the gate as soon as I stepped out the back door in the morning, demanding her bottle to be brought without delay!
When it came time to switch the weanlings back, I found I had become too attached to Iris so she became a permanent addition. Occasionally, my animals will pick up a nickname that winds up superseding their real name and this is the case with Iris. I called her dinky so many times that she became The Dink. Since she has a physical defect (2 teats per side on her udder) on top of being so small, she will never be bred but she’ll be with us forever.
